John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

The #HIT100 has come to a close with plenty of controversy and discussion about the details of “the list.” In fact, there are twolists you can enjoy perusing. I’ll leave the controversy for someone else. As I mentioned when I hosted the #HIT99 last year, I’m not that interested in the ranking on the list. With just my own health IT Twitter accounts I could get someone in the top 75 (it was top 50 last year, so that’s an improvement as far as involvement) and so it’s easy to see how the system can be easily gamed. Such is life with any crowd sourced list. I’ll leave that to the data experts.

Instead, I find the most valuable parts of the #HIT100 in the nominating process itself and in the social discovery of everyone that’s nominated.

When it comes to the nominating process, it’s amazing to share and be shown gratitude. I believe in the power of gratitude and the #HIT100 is a great time to express appreciation to so many of the people on healthcare social media that have affected your life. Given the state of society, a little gratitude and recognition is a really beautiful thing. We need more of that, not less of it. I’m glad that most people enjoy the gratitude and don’t get lost in the competitive aspects of it.

As far as social discovery, I probably know or have seen most of the people in the top 100 of the #HIT100. Seeing them on the list is nice, but it doesn’t do much for me if I already know them and interact with them on a regular basis. That’s why I like to look beyond the Top 100 so I can discover new accounts I probably had never seen before.

Since I find such value in the new account discovery that can happen by looking at anyone that’s been nominated to the #HIT100 or anyone that’s nominated someone to the #HIT100, I took @shimecode’s data and created this spreadsheet of everyone that was nominated and everyone that nominated someone else. There are a lot of incredible Twitter accounts throughout the list that are worth adding to your followers.

As has been noted by many people, there are a lot of people that impact healthcare and health IT that aren’t on social media or Twitter. That’s true and it’s ok. The #HIT100 is about those that are on social media. We could start a whole other list of people who aren’t on social media, but that would be a different list. In fact, maybe we should start a list of people we wish were on Twitter that aren’t. That would be fascinating.

All in all, I know that @theehrguy and @shimcode put a lot of work into processing the data for #HIT100. Which list is right and which list is wrong? The more I’ve thought about it, the more I don’t care. I’ll stick to enjoying the gratitude and social discovery that still exists in the #HIT100. Now, time to go through the list and see who else I should start following.